


When good Americans die, they go to Paris

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Angst, Artists, Civil War, Conspiracy, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Henriette - Freeform, Insomnia, Marriage, Murder, Paris (City), Post-Canon, Romance, The Author Regrets Nothing, The Ship Who Shall Not Be Named
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29511456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: "He closed his eyes against the pain, but welcomed it all the same."Anyone who knew Henry Hopkins would be shocked. Anyone who knew him well would understand.
Relationships: Emma Green/Henry Hopkins, Henry Hopkins & Mary Phinney, Henry Hopkins/Lisette Beaufort, Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney
Comments: 23
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Five](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28491273) by [BroadwayBaggins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BroadwayBaggins/pseuds/BroadwayBaggins). 



“It pains me to admit it, Mary, but I’m not sure what’s put the wrinkle on your fair brow,” Jed said, crossing his legs and looking far more elegant than he had any right to be on a Wednesday night at home. The lamplight picked out the embroidery on his waistcoat and the grey at his temples, reflected in his dark eyes but added nothing to the warmth that was so readily apparent. The Fosters at home, he was wont to call such an evening, his tone making it clear the depth of his contentment, his continual surprise at how he’d achieved his heart’s desire.

“There are a surfeit of reasons?” she replied. “How disappointing.”

“You needn’t tell me if you don’t want to,” he said. “Though I can’t promise not to needle you if I suspect you are letting yourself suffer unduly. I know your ways and I give you fair warning, madam.”

“You needn’t needle. It’s nothing to trouble you,” she said, laying a hand on the curve of her belly and smiling. She’d already changed into her dressing sacque and was as close to comfortable as she came these days. Daniel and Elias were snug in their beds, having gone down easily with a story and a lullaby, but the baby she carried was always more active as soon as she settled herself on the sofa.

“I could fetch you a cup of tea if Mrs. Hudson’s gone to bed,” Jed offered. “Or perhaps another slice of her jelly roll. She outdid herself tonight.”

“No, thank you. I’m not hungry—for a change,” Mary said. “It’s as I said, it’s nothing to trouble yourself over.”

“Well, then. Shall you satisfy my curiosity or shall I endeavor to make out what Jules finds so appealing in _The Charterhouse of Parma_?” Jed asked. 

“You’d have to stop using it as a doorstop first,” Mary said, chaffing him to see him smile and because it was the truth. “It’s queer you should mention Jules, because that’s what’s troubling me, in a roundabout fashion.”

“Jules is troubling you? But how?” Jed said, genuinely perplexed, and, she could tell, worried. Jed wrote regularly to his old friend, but Mary had only sent a polite note of gratitude after receiving the beautiful crystal bowl Jules had sent as a wedding gift.

“No, that’s why I said in a roundabout fashion. It’s Henry, Henry Hopkins,” Mary said. 

“Mary, nothing you’ve said makes any sense. Henry and Jules, why there couldn’t be two fellows with less in common, chalk and cheese,” Jed said. “Well, chalk and Camembert.”

“They do have something quite important in common. They’re both in Paris,” Mary explained.

“Reverend Henry Hopkins in Paris?” Jed said. 

“Montmartre, to be precise,” Mary said. “He’s written he’s taken a room with a view of the Basilica.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jed said. 

“There’s more,” Mary said. “On second thought, perhaps I would like that cup of tea. You’ll want a brandy.”


	2. Chapter 2

“I know I said you needn’t bring me more cake, but it seems you know me better than I know myself,” Mary said, setting down the fork on the plate that had very recently held a generous slice of the jelly-roll. Mrs. Hudson had learned not to use raspberry or strawberry preserves, as the dessert then bore an unfortunate resemblance to an abdominal surgery, but Jed preferred apricot jam anyway and Mary found she was not very particular once her morning sickness had thankfully receded. She took a sip of the tea, which was nearly the same hue as the inch of brandy remaining in Jed’s glass.

“It’s good to see you with a healthy appetite. And to be able to satisfy it so easily.” Happily, his tone was leaning towards the uxorious and not the bitter melancholy he was still, though less frequently, subject to. “Now shall you tell me the tale of young Henry in Paris?”

“I may make a beginning, at any rate. You see, it was Miss Hastings who gave him the idea,” Mary said.

“Our Lady of the Everlasting Blasted Crimea Anne Hastings told Henry Hopkins to go to Paris?” Jed exclaimed. 

“Do you intend to go on like this, Jed?” Mary said. “As if you are Mrs. Siddons treading the boards of Drury Lane, before you ask what ‘like this’ means.”

“You must allow me **some** reaction if you are going to heap drama upon drama like a brick-layer constructing the Great Wall of China,” Jed said. “But I shall endeavor to restrain myself.”

“I suppose that will have to do,” she said with a sigh that held more than a hint of laughter. “It was after we married, those few weeks of springtime just before it became summer—I remember the dogwood tree by the front door of our house on Prince Street was in full bloom…it must have been a Sunday afternoon, for they’d come for tea after the service, Henry and Miss Hastings and Miss Green. Dr. Hale was furloughed, so you’d stayed at the hospital to see to the boys. I know you are wondering why you have no memory of this whatsoever.”

“I don’t and I was and you’re adorable,” he said. “I think I should pay better attention if I sat nearer though.”

“All right,” she said, shifting to make a more reasonable space on the sofa, only a little surprised when he lifted her feet into his lap and started rubbing them gently. “Mind you don’t tickle me—you know I’m liable to kick.”

“I know. Tell me about the tea party from Hell,” he said.

“It wasn’t though. Miss Hastings was far less acidic than usual, her remarks were witty and so acute, it was refreshing, and Emma was quite the prettiest she’d ever been, for all that she wore a twice-turned dress, so full of charm and thoughtfulness. And Henry—”

“Yes, how was Henry, among the three Graces?”

“He was shy at first, as you know he could be. But then he relaxed, just as he could over the chessboard with you—he didn’t become as loquacious as some,” she said, smiling, “but he spoke well, his words well-chosen, his conclusions sound and he was most interested when Miss Hastings spoke of her travels, the ‘wide, wide world,’ she said. He asked her about her favorite city and I think we all expected her to say London or maybe Rome, but she said Paris was the best place—for the heartbroken or the heartless and everyone in between. And then she finished off the lemon tart and the apple crumble.”

“You think that was it? A stray remark by Nurse Hastings before she gobbled up the desserts which your poor husband had nary a bite of?”

“I made you a cocoa bavaroise a la Moderne that I did not serve. You were very…appreciative even if the laundress was not,” Mary said, appreciating how Jed’s hands stroked her unswollen ankles and then higher, hidden by the hem of her sacque. “And then, as to poor dear Henry, you must recall—Alice, in September.”

“Never has anything sounded so poetic and been so grotesque,” Jed said. His hands were still and his eyes had grown darker. 

“So you must see how he remembered what Anne said,” Mary replied. “How he must have held onto her words like a talisman, more powerful than any prayer.”

“Anne Hastings compelled our Reverend more than the Gospel? Even Luke?” Jed said. Mary smiled, at his humor and the touch of his hands, at his irrepressible disenchantment with her former colleague, at his actual preference for a book of the Bible which had made her understand his belief was present, if very different from her own. 

“Even Luke doesn’t speak much about heartbreak, Jedediah,” she said. “And he’d have been ashamed to admit it then, even though we could all see it and understand. Matron was afraid Henry would let himself be killed in battle, she told me as much and I couldn’t argue with her. When I think of how terrible it was, well-- Paris seems a far better alternative.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Alice, in September,_ Mary had said and lying awake in the spill of moonlight beside his wife, Jed marveled again at how perfectly Mary the remark had been, the exquisite economy of words married to an unexpected loveliness, a reflection of her graceful, incisive mind and unfortunately for Henry Hopkins, the incontrovertible truth. 

Jed often found himself thus, his mind still restless, too alert to drift off as easily as Mary did, even more so with her pregnancy. When it had been Eliza next to him, her bright hair like a silver plait between them, he had stewed and fretted, finding consolation only in the stratagem of various complex surgeries, more often rising bleary-eyed and resentful; he did not feel guilty for it now but he accepted he had been wrong to hold her slumber against her, wrong to assume it was either peaceful or dreamless. As Mary slept, he was able to let his mind roam without any underlying vitriol poisoning him. Memories came to him in equal measure with innovation and if Mary woke to find him still thinking, her hands caressing his face were often enough to bring him Morpheus’s welcome—or Aphrodite’s delights. Tonight, his thoughts turned to his old friend Henry, who, for want of either, had fled to Paris. In the dim light of the waning moon, Jed remembered that late summer. That early, terrible fall.

They’d been busy enough, even though it was nothing compared to Chickamauga. General Meade spent the month in battles that were half skirmish, half debacle, but there wasn’t a full-on annihilation and if the rates of dysentery remained steady, so did their supply of rice, sorghum, meal and lye, which went a fair way to keeping the hospital tolerable. They’d been happy enough, more than Jed felt he personally deserved—Mary had made a sanctuary of the house he leased on Prince Street, without any of the elaborate draperies and bric-a-brac that Eliza had favored, placing her few ornaments to advantage and making sure there were fresh flowers and books in equal profusion. Anne Hastings was as close as she could come to contentedness, having finally achieved the Head Nurse position and so had become almost kindly to Mrs. Foster when she visited the wards to write letters and sit beside the boys her husband had stitched together. 

The efficient running of the hospital meant Major McBurney had ample time to devote to his own esoteric devices and studies. He was rarely seen on the wards but only required endless pots of whatever passed for coffee to be delivered to his office on a tray; there had been no sequelae to the peach tart fiasco. Henry Hopkins and Emma Green, though both attentive to their vocations, were growing closer in a way too sweetly innocent and shy for anyone to remark upon; not even Byron Hale could find it within himself to comment on the roses in Emma’s cheeks or the way the minister’s voice rang out when he sang hymns of an evening. Perhaps he was yet another example of hubris, but Jed freely admitted he could not have imagined that by month’s end, he’d be standing up for Major Clayton McBurney at his wedding to ashen-faced Emma Green, officiated by Henry Hopkins in a frayed and mended frock coat, his voice even, each word as final as the clods of earth thrown in an open grave.

If only it had not rained so much—then perhaps the body of the murdered Union officer would not have been so readily revealed in Mrs. Green’s dahlia bed. If only his feckless killers had gone through his pockets, finding the slim leather folio in its oilskin wrappings, the letters and notes incriminating Alice Green as a Confederate spy and member of the Golden Crescent only slightly wilted by their time underground. 

If only Frank Stringfellow had been involved in the commission of the crime and the disposition of the corpse—his past actions promised that he would have minimized any remaining evidence, even if it meant setting off a bomb, there would have been nothing left of the officer but his brass buttons melted into a solitary ingot. If only Alice had not come to her sister, frantic, unkempt, attracting every eye with her blonde curls plastered wet with rain (or tears) against flaming cheeks, the sly coquette far removed from the young girl who finally saw what the future held for her: prison and then the noose. 

If only there had been any other member of her family she could turn to in a crisis, but the Green family pride could not conceal their many weaknesses. If only their morals had not been concentrated in one single soul, the one they’d virtually cast out.

_If only…_

“It doesn’t do to underestimate incompetence, Jedediah,” Mary had said when he’d paused for breath. They sat nursing cold cups of chamomile tea at the dining room table the night of the wedding, the lamplight gold on Mary’s chestnut hair. “It doesn’t do any good to anybody.”

“And that’s what Emma Green, excuse me, Emma McBurney has done?” he asked.

“She did all the good she was able. Alice is her sister. What else could she do?” Mary asked. She hadn’t sounded so weary in months and he searched her face, her beautiful dark eyes, the way she held the belly of the china cup in her hand very gently, but as if she might yet find some warmth in it.

“Was this your doing?” he asked. “I don’t mean to sit in judgment, just to understand—”

“No, she didn’t come to me. I didn’t help, I could never have planned this. She went to Matron, to someone who wouldn’t shirk from doing something like this. Who understands better than any of us how and when to sacrifice the queen.”

What Emma McBurney, née Green, had done was practical: she had gotten herself engaged to the senior ranking Union officer in Alexandria, a well-connected, well-bred man with Southern sympathies, if his time at Princeton was anything to go by, a man of wealth and power. A man who could send his wife and sister to stay with relatives in the North, at the family estate or a more secluded cottage on the seashore where his wife and her sister might regain their health from the fevers that had laid them low in Virginia. A man who, with a wave of his hand, could summarily dismiss any rumors about conspiracies or treason before they became allegations. A man broken by the War yet with his sense of honor still intact, a man who would marry a young woman he’d compromised. A man who could be compromised, if a young woman was willing to risk everything, to lay her hand on a scarred cheek and murmur about _only wanting to help_ , a young woman who made sure that Matron opened the door wide at just that moment, to create a tableau that could not be unseen by Sister Isabella and Dr. Hale, Emma Green in the arms of Major Clayton McBurney, Emma Green in love.

What Emma had done was sacrifice herself for her sister’s life and honor. She’d kept her plan a secret and she hadn’t spoken a word to Henry Hopkins since Major McBurney announced their brief engagement. She’d been determined to be a good wife and she’d agreed with everything her betrothed said, only asking that her sister might come to stay with her, away from the battle-front. Emma had worn one of her mother’s silk dresses cut down and retrimmed to the wedding—it was a deep blue, the color of the Union, much darker than her eyes. She’d trusted that Henry would understand what she’d done and that she never expected to see him again. 

Within a week, Mrs. McBurney and her sister had boarded a train bound for Saratoga Springs, bid adieu by Mary Foster and James Green; Major McBurney had been most extremely correct, kissing his wife’s gloved hand as she stood at the threshold of the hospital, then returned to his study, shaking his head. Within a week, Mary became ill, taking nearly all of Jed’s attention until she was able to rise from her bed and keep down more than dry toast, until they determined her illness would be of fixed duration and promised a joyous, fruitful end. Within a week, Henry Hopkins had lost his faith and his heart and any fear for his safety.

Within a week, it was October.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to everyone who wanted Alice to die. I'm sure she finds society in Sarataga Springs a fate worse than death.
> 
> The Battle of Chickamauga, fought on September 18–20, 1863, between U.S. and Confederate forces in the American Civil War, marked the end of a Union offensive, the Chickamauga Campaign, in southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia. It was the first major battle of the war fought in Georgia, the most significant Union defeat in the Western Theater, and involved the second-highest number of casualties after the Battle of Gettysburg.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Oscar Wilde. The summary quotes BroadwayBaggins's fic.
> 
> Jelly roll (aka Swiss roll) was a popular dessert in the US by the 1850s.
> 
> The Charterhouse of Parma, novel by Stendhal, published in French as La Chartreuse de Parme in 1839. It is generally considered one of Stendhal’s masterpieces, second only to The Red and the Black, and is remarkable for its highly sophisticated rendering of human psychology and its subtly drawn portraits. A current edition is around 560 pages.


End file.
